


Glossolalia

by Termagant (subduction)



Category: Hornblower (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-01-13
Updated: 2008-01-13
Packaged: 2017-10-06 00:50:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/47877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/subduction/pseuds/Termagant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>You have sailed on ships since you were twelve, but there has never been another boy quite like Jack Hammond.</i> For the <a href="http://community.livejournal.com/aos_challenge">aos_challenge</a> "sidekick" challenge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Glossolalia

Midshipman Hammond is new to the sea and the ways of men, but you have sailed on ships since you were twelve. There is a language of these things, like but unlike the language of ships: a cousin, perhaps.

Jack, with his schoolboy words, would call it a _dialect_, but Jack does not speak either language yet.

*

Altogether, thirteen times. Four with hot hands in the dark. Twice in your hammock, his stomach flat and trembling beneath yours, sweat on his brow, hips notched together and rocking with the ocean. Slow, slow breaths. He likes it when you pull his clothes off roughly, and when you hold him down with your hands, and when you put your mouth all wet on his throat and suck hard until he comes against you, wide-eyed and silent.

Once in the foretop, when the captain had sent you both up for failing at the trigonometry problems he'd set. Jack does not speak the language, does not know how things are done; Jack is too reckless in love and too cautious in war. He knelt before you in the twilight, _don't_, you said, _still too light, someone'll—_, and he hushed your mouth with his, and maneuvered you round to sit with your back against the mast. Quick fingers on buttons and then he was sliding one leg over each of yours and around the mast, leaning back on his hands, so that your view was of a pale triangle of skin between shirttails, of the languorous planes of hips, and of your own cock pushing hot and desperate against the hard-ridged underside of his.

Once after battle, his face still tear-stroked, his mouth so pliant, so fevered on your skin. Your dreams had you waking hot and wet for days on the memory: the softness of him, the yearning.

Once after Sunday inspection: Jack so hard he could barely climb into the berth, and once you were in, Jack shoving you up against the bulkhead with one hand on your hip and one on the wall, pushing and pushing as though to get right inside of you, and biting your shoulder so hard it bore the mark for a week.

Three times with his mouth. Once with yours. After he'd been caned, gentle, gentle, with his hands in your hair and your hand over his lips to stop him crying out. He'd come back walking stiffly, wet-lashed, and when you'd gotten him out of his jacket and untucked his shirt you traced the scarlet flush of his cheeks down, down, all the way to where his trousers were too tight and shuddered at the brush of fingertips, hot shame rising in his face all over again. He'd gone oddly still, afterward; had lifted your hand from his lips and taken the first two fingers in his mouth, deliberate and dark-eyed. It was almost suffocating, the hotness of the spark which flared inside you then: some hungry, essential _need_ to undo your own trousers, to push him down by the shoulders and slide your cock over those lips, to paint his face with it—

You have sailed on ships since you were twelve, but there has never been another boy quite like Jack Hammond.

*

Jack reads strange books. He keeps them hidden in his sea-chest, at first, half a dozen of them tucked reverently among spare shirts, but later he brings them out, and later still he will read to you on occasion. Some of it is recognizably English, though you cannot parse half the words and the meanings all the less. Still, you like to hear it. Jack has a low, rhythmic, pleasing voice, and he will lie in your hammock some evenings, shirtless with that catlike half-smile he wears after a tumble, and recite a verse of Blake or Milton from memory.

Some of it is in odd foreign tongues, words which tumble from his lips with surprising grace for all their harsh sounds. One line, or sentence, or fragment, he repeats under his breath when he thinks no-one can hear it — but often enough that you have come to recognize the contours of it, its shape on his lips. You asked him once and he said only, cryptically, "Greek."

You are not sure what it is, this murmured devotion of his, but from the look in his eyes when he says it, you do not think it is meant for you.


End file.
